While we never had an official build thread, I’ve posted things here and there and wanted to pull together some of our build season and overall improvements from event to event.
Speaking of improvement, here’s how my team did from week to week
We decided on the ever-so-popular Lego traversal climber. I started working on a design immediately. We also decided on a vertical pitching machine design with two inches of compression. The first competition-used iteration of our climber was definitely consistent, though we were wary of increasing the speeds too much given our little amount of practice.
Week 1
Before Kokomo in Week 1 we had no time for drive practice, and barely had time to get a two ball auto working. We scored a horrendously low number of cargo, but we traversed in all but two quals matches. We ranked 7th going into alliance selections, but we were eliminated in the quarter finals.
Before Tippecanoe, we first had to rebuild literally our entire robot because we fell and warped everything. Sick. This gave us a chance to improve on most of our designs. We improved the electrical mess we had originally and made it stronger with more bracing and gussets, to name a few things.
^^^ In the process of rebuilding. Those aren’t speed holes, those are for uhh, air cooling our NEOs
Our climbs also got much faster. We were running the winch motors at 60% power, but @Nick_Lawrence told us to send it and go full speed. When the Nick Lawrence tells you to send it, you send it. Going faster made our climbs smoother too.
Week 4
We had about a week and half of practice and testing going into Tippe. This was evident, and we ended up seeding fourth after our final three quals matches all being over 100 points. We picked 4272 and 1741 to round out our number three Alliance, and made a run to the semi finals. The further limitations of our robot began to show even more at this event. Our intake was slow and we lost a lot of pulleys. It also wasn’t full-width, so I had to hit cargo along walls straight on. At this point, I was still manually aligning to shoot as well, slowing our cycle times even more.
Going into state, we knew we had to bring our “A” game. We decided to switch to a pneumatically actuated, four bar intake, and also use cylinders to actuate our climb arms. Our new intake worked great, and so did the faster-moving climb arms. We had two full weeks of high quality practice, including practice with 3940, 45, 7457, 3176, and a handful of other teams during this time. We also got a four ball auto working, though it barely worked during state despite no software changes.
State Championship
What a freaking bloodbath. Our robot performed excitingly well, and we were the third highest ranked team by OPR, averaging 40.6 points per match with our best being 55. We got the state record of 130 with 4926 and 8116, and we attempted a triple traversal with 4926 and 829.
Notice I said “we attempted”…
829 gave us their custom award for best climber:
And we won the Autonomous Award because of our automated conveyor and shooter. In sum, our programmer has automated most of our responsibilities away, and we only have a few buttons to press while competing. There’s more to this and I’d love to explain it further if anyone asks.
